How can Finnish Youth Centres develop camp education export to China

As Finnish education export entered a new era, educational travel to Finland was also on a quick rise before Covid-19, with Chinese groups accounting for the largest share. Camp education, as a main educational travel product in Finland, has become a hot phenomenon worthy of study, especially when camp education industry in China has grown dramatically since 2015. Finnish Youth Centres, well known as the biggest camp education organizer in Finland, also attracted many Chinese camp school groups. However, Finnish Youth Centres have seen many barriers in the camp education export. The main objective of this research was to help Finnish Youth Centres develop their camp education export to China by figuring out the challenges they faced in practice and offering constructive suggestions for improvement. The theoretical framework applied was service marketing mix 7Ps. Qualitative research method was adopted as the methodology and primary data was collected through 8 semi-structured interviews with experts from 3 different interested parties. Data analysis followed the method of qualitative content analysis. The research explored the challenges and suggestions from the perspectives of 7Ps. The results found that the main challenges faced by Finnish Youth Centres were for example product differentiation, school visit, pricing for extra services, lack of financial and human resources, marketing materials, language skills, cultural awareness, lack of process description and old facilities. The research suggested Youth Centres to concentrate on the product development, marketing materials development, responsible pricing, exhibition and sales event participating, staff professionalism, process description preparation and regular updating of pictures and videos. Besides, the research identified that networking was crucial for Youth Centres. They were recommended to cooperate with other Youth Centres, establish partnerships with other educational service providers and distribution channels such as incoming agencies, DMOs and Visit Finland. Some of the research results could be applied to other camp education and educational travel service providers too. In the end, suggestions were given for the industry managers in terms of strategic management decisions, product development, partnership, staff competences and process description